- Pritzker Fellows
- Former Fellows
- Kirsten Lodal
Kirsten Lodal
CEO & Co-Founder of Anti-Poverty Organization LIFT
Winter 2018 Visiting Pritzker Fellow
Seminar Series: “The Critical Role of Non-Profits in a Divided Society”
Biography
Kirsten Lodal is the CEO and Co-Founder of LIFT, which began as an idea during her sophomore year of college in 1998 and has become one of the foremost anti-poverty organizations in the country. Under Kirsten’s leadership, LIFT has created positive outcomes for more than 100,000 families and established itself as a national model for more effective and human-centered social services. Along the way, Kirsten has become a leading advocate for re-thinking and modernizing the design of America’s anti-poverty programs, spreading LIFT’s message from the White House and Capitol Hill to the NBC Nightly News, the PBS Newshour, CNN, and The New York Times.
Kirsten has received numerous honors for her work on behalf of families, including the National Jefferson Award for Public Service, established in 1972 by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis as our nation’s “Nobel Prize for community and public service” and the John F. Kennedy New Frontier Award for young Americans committed to public service. She is an Ascend Fellow at the Aspen Institute, a Kresge Foundation NextGen Human Services Fellow, and a member of the New America/Bloomberg Shift Commission on the Future of Work. She serves on numerous boards, including the Homeless Children’s Playtime Project, a program working to restore childhood to children living in shelters, and DC Greens, a non-profit focused on advancing food justice in our nation’s capital.
Kirsten is a graduate of Yale University and the Executive Management Program at the Columbia Business School’s Institute for Not-for-Profit Management. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband, Jeff Himmelman, a writer and musician, and their three young daughters, Billie, Joni, and Celia.
Seminars
“The Critical Role of Non-Profits in a Divided Society”
In this session, Kirsten Lodal will share the story of building LIFT and the organization’s journey through two decades of fighting poverty. Started when she was a sophomore at Yale, LIFT has gone from campus start-up to what is now widely considered to be one of the country’s foremost anti-poverty organizations. What were the challenges of starting, scaling, and effectively running an organization? What metrics does one use to measure success and how do those evolve? This will be an unvarnished, off-the-record conversation that features the good, the bad, and the ugly of non-profit start-up, survival, and impact.
As an organization grows and develops over time, social needs also change, as do the policy and political waters an organization must navigate to continue to have impact. What worked 5, or even 2 years ago may no longer be relevant, and an organization must keep a critical eye on its mission and strategic vision and hold itself accountable. In this session, Kirsten Lodal will delve into the necessary but difficult process of organizational and strategic transformation to drive social change. She will use LIFT’s own transformation over the last several years - evolving from an organization largely delivering poverty “remediation” services to an organization laser focused on poverty “alleviation” - as a case study. She will also delve into different approaches to transformation and change management, including lean design and the Japanese practice of Nemawashi.